Violence and Nonviolence in Anti-colonial and Feminist Thought

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Session Description

This roundtable investigates the rights and responsibilities, potentialities and pitfalls, that are implied by use of violence and nonviolence by women and indigenous colonized peoples as a political strategy of minoritarian revolution, refusal, and self-defense. We ask: How might we differentiate between violent and nonviolent political tactics? Is such differentiation even possible or theoretically productive? Who is legible as a revolutionary actor engaging in violence? In what ways do gender and race unevenly distribute the capacity to exercise violence for revolution or self-defense? Could we characterize anti-colonial violence as indigenous refusal? If so, is that refusal world-denying or world-building?

To set the stage, Samuel Galloway pairs a reading of Hannah Arendt’s “Home to Roost” with the concluding scene of Don’t Look Up!, to ask after the implications of a queer, wild confrontation that refuses Western epistemologies of wonderment and domestication, intuits the genocidal threat menaced by capitalist logics of settler colonialism, and takes action to prevent the destruction of a commonly habitable world. Where Galloway endeavors democratic dreamwork, Pinar Kemerli roots a rival ethic of nonviolence in the Kurdish liberation movement's experience of revolutionary self-defense as it aims to democratize the use of violence and prevent its monopolization by the state, ultimately to eliminate violence from communal life. Further dwelling in transformative practices of violence, Rose Owen recuperates the role of Algerian women as violent revolutionary actors in Frantz Fanon’s thought to call into question both masculinist and more recent nonviolent or ambivalent readings of his relationship to violence. Thus, too, Archana Kaku proposes a feminist phenomenology, attuned to both intersubjectivity and interdependence, to analyze “difficult” forms of violence: forms of violence which destroy beyond the point of death, and forms of violence which are designed for the explicit purpose of causing pain. Yet, by theorizing how even though women of color in the U.S. disproportionately experience police violence, they nevertheless lack access to the white discourse of feminized vulnerability that would justify recourse to violent self-defense, Menaka Philips foregrounds how gendered and racialized dimensions of violence make it for some a scarce resource. Finally, against the claim that constituent power merely served to discipline the people into peaceful constitution-making, Kevin Duong theorizes the link between constituent power and revolutionary violence based on examples from the French, Haitian, and American revolutions, as well as Sigmund Freud’s Totem and Taboo.

What emerges is less a recapitulation of binary prescriptions for or against than a multifaceted consideration of the ways that violence already inflects the daily political existence of oppressed racial, gender, ethnic, and colonial subjects. By asking after how violence informs the kinds of political responses, relations, and practices that are imagined, refused, ventured, denied, and collectively reconfigured by minoritarian subjects, this roundtable seeks an account of political violence that is recuperative and critical. In the productive spaces between, we invite and seek a generative conversation regarding a pressing question of political theory and praxis today.

Sub Unit

• Division 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Chair

• Samuel R. Galloway Purchase College

Presenters

• Pınar Kemerli Bard College

• Rose Owen The New School

• Archana Kaku William & Mary

• Menaka M Philips University of Toronto

• Kevin Duong University of Virginia